an interview with:
Webster G. Tarpley, scholar, author of Surviving the Cataclysm
The two-faced Obama does another 180…
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs had a hard time Tuesday explaining an apparent about-face by President Obama on whether Bush administration lawyers should be prosecuted for writing legal memos authorizing “enhanced interrogation techniques” that some consider to have been torture.
“With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Mr. Obama said today, adding that “there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”
This seemed to fly in the face of what the president chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said on Sunday.
“Those who devised policy, [the president] believes that they were — should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.
Gibbs was asked about this discrepancy repeatedly at the daily press briefing. At one point, he suggested that the press simply not pay attention to what Emanuel had said.
“Instead of referring to what anybody might have said, I think it’s important — or anything that I might have said — it’s important to refer to what the president said,” Gibbs said.
EXCLUSIVE: U.S. contacted Iran’s Ayatollah before election:
(Didn’t Obama state clearly and unequivocally he didn’t want to interfere with the politics of Tehran when Iranian citizens were being killed during the protests?
If you voted for this FRAUD… thanks alot for electing the most UNAmerican president in the history of the US who could not care less about people. Read on!)
Prior to this month’s disputed presidential election in Iran, the Obama administration sent a letter to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for an improvement in relations, according to interviews and the leader himself.
Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the letter toward the end of a lengthy sermon last week, in which he accused the United States of fomenting protests in his country in the aftermath of the disputed June 12 presidential election.
U.S. officials declined to discuss the letter on Tuesday, a day in which President Obama gave his strongest condemnation yet of the Iranian crackdown against protesters.
An Iranian with knowledge of the overture, however, told The Washington Times that the letter was sent between May 4 and May 10 and laid out the prospect of “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations” and a resolution of the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program.
The Iranian, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the letter was given to the Iranian Foreign Ministry by a representative of the Swiss Embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of U.S.-Iran diplomatic relations. The letter was then delivered to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, he said.
The letter was sent before the election, whose outcome – delivering a supposed landslide to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – has touched off the biggest anti-government protests in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The Obama administration, while criticizing a violent crackdown on demonstrators by Iranian security forces, has said that it will continue efforts to engage the Iranian government about its nuclear program and other issues touching on U.S. national security.
In his news conference on Tuesday, however, President Obama gave his most forceful statement yet about Iran’s actions, which have led to the deaths of at least 17 protesters, including a young woman whose shooting death has become known around the world through the Internet.
“I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs. But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place. … Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”
“The Iranian, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic, said the letter was given to the Iranian Foreign Ministry by a representative of the Swiss Embassy, which represents U.S. interests in Iran in the absence of U.S.-Iran diplomatic relations. The letter was then delivered to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, he said.”
